Attack on Titan
2013 anime based on a 2009-present manga. Mentioned on r/anime or r/animesuggest, not sure which, as being a quality current anime. Length 24 episodes of ~20 minutes each. First attempt (July 2013) Format At home, Japanese with subtitles. Journal Watched the first episode on the 9th of July. Wow, gruesome! Definitely intrigued. At some point I watched the second episode as well, but I didn't think much of it and after reading some comments that it was all bark and no bite and considering that I'd accumulated a massive list of anime to watch, I kind of wrote it off. Second attempt (February 2014) Format As before. Journal In early February 2014 I read some fans raving about it on reddit again, something about episode 5 being a doozie, so I thought I might watch that far some time. I picked it up again from the second episode on the 24th or so, and watched a couple of episodes a night in bed on my borrowed Macbook thingy. Episode 5 was indeed somewhat of a surprise, and I'm intrigued to find out what's going to happen, but my bet is that it'll be lame, like that blonde idiot going berserk and pulling wassisface out of the titan, or him somehow getting himself out despite having one arm and one leg. How he'll manage in that state I don't know. Reached episode 8 on the 28th. Saw that coming a mile off, but it was still quite cool the way it happened. Watched episode 13 on the 3rd of March. Halfway through the series now, and I am enjoying it. It's guilty of stringing things out a lot, with every episode ending on a cliffhanger that makes you want to watch the next one immediately, but then the next spends 15 minutes farting about on some unrelated or relatively minor plot point. But as a whole the fact that it's succeeding in repeatedly ending episodes in a way that makes me want to watch on is certainly a metric of success. Finished the series on the 13th of March. Left a lot unanswered, which might have been unsatisfying if I hadn't just enjoyed watching it so much. I don't know what did it, and I'm not totally in love with it (the most annoying flaw was the trend of starting every episode with 10-15 minutes of not much happening, no matter what the last episode had ended with, before finding some hyped up cliffhanger event to end with as if the next episode was gonna be a biggee!), but I think what I enjoyed was the truly, consistently bleak outlook the characters had to face, where it seemed anyone could die during any titan encounter, the unanswered mysteries of their little world, the action sequences being just pretty darn cool, the ambiguity and difficulty of effectively using the main characters special power, and the slowly increasing complexity of the enemy faction. Apparently the manga is approaching enough material now for a second season of the anime, so I shall look forward to that! Rating 2, I think, maybe, just :P Category:Works Category:TV series Category:Japanese TV series Category:Fantasy TV series Category:Dystopia TV series Category:Cartoons Category:2010s TV series Category:TV series attempted in 2013 Category:TV series watched in 2014 Category:TV series with 2 rating